Arts
Twenty-eight years ago, Glenis Redmond was a clinical counselor for the state of South Carolina and the mother of twin toddler girls when she learned her excruciating condition had a name, Fibromyalgia. After absorbing the ramifications of her diagnosis, she recalls thinking of a prescient line of verse from the poet Lucille Clifton. "'Everyday something has tried to kill me and it's failed,' and it was an awakening of sorts," Redmond recalled. "That poem made me think, 'Well, if you're going to be sick, if you're going to not feel well, what's going to make you want to get up in the morning?'" Redmond had come from a family of storytellers, and she first wrote and performed poetry as an outlet of personal expression. "I was worried about getting whatever toxins--mentally, emotionally, psychologically, culturally--I was bent on getting that out of my psyche, out of the vessel of who I am," she said. Before long, she evolved into one of the country's eminent voices connecting contemporary